Wednesday, February 06, 2008

The Catechism Gap

Following up on my earlier post about Catholic support for Obama, here is a table showing the Democratic vote for white Catholics and white Protestants in each of the Super Tuesday states where there were exit polls and where there were enough white Catholics to measure. I focused on white Catholics to control for Clinton's heavy support among Latinos, most of whom are Catholics, and white Protestants to control for Obama's heavy support among African-Americans, most of whom are Protestant. (All data gathered from CBS News exit polls).

White Catholics

White Protestants

Clinton

Obama

Difference

Clinton

Obama

Difference

Catechism Gap

AZ

61

33

28

55

34

21

3.5

CA

53

35

18

48

34

14

2

CT

59

39

20

41

55

-14

17

DE

61

32

29

57

40

17

6

GA

58

42

16

61

34

27

-5.5

IL

53

46

7

41

56

-15

11

MA

67

31

36

54

44

10

13

MO

50

46

4

56

40

16

-6

NJ

71

26

45

66

32

34

5.5

NY

65

31

34

57

40

17

8.5

TN

58

35

23

69

24

45

-11

Average

4

The table shows that the Catechism Gap is evident mostly in the East and the Midwest. Obama actually ran better among white Catholics in GA, MO, and TN and only slightly behind in AZ and CA. This suggests that other issues, such as race, age, ethnicity, or class might also be playing a role here. Without having a fuller look at the exit polls, we don't know if white Catholics in these states are perhaps older or poorer than in the other states, and thus more likely to vote for Clinton on those lines. On the other hand, racial conflict in these areas usually pitted Blacks against working class whites, most of whom were Catholics. Outside of these areas, either racial divisions were not as acute (AZ and CA) or were between White Protestants and Blacks (MO, TN, and GA).

Good post, thank you. Obama also lost by a wide margin among Catholics in NH and NV. However, Ohio has one of the lowest percentages of Catholics in the USA outside of the South, namely 19% of its total pop. This is a far lower percentage than in the northeastern states that Obama lost on Tuesday, namely MA=44%, NY=38%, NJ=37%. Meanwhile CT=32% where Obama was the winner. If the percentage of CT voters who were Catholic were somewhat higher then Obama would've lost there. BTW, PA=27% and IL=29%. As I said these numbers are total pop but in relation to one another, for between-state comparisons, they also reflect turnout pop reasonably well. Given these numbers I don't think Obama's campaign has to fret much about the Ohio Catholic demographic. PA is more challenging but in PA Obama will have the benefit of a lot of time to make his case -- and he's been running a great campaign so far. Numbers taken from nice graphs at http://www.usatoday.com/graphics/news/gra/gnoreligion/flash.htm

This is probably more of an "Irish Gap" than anything else. The Irish absolutely love Bill Clinton because of his role in the Northern Ireland peace process. You can probably add some self-described white Hispanics to that.